Baidu taps Marvell for ARM storage server SoC

In a presentation last month, a Facebook executive talked about the
explosion in growth of photos and other data the company must archive.
He discussed new designs for hot and cold storage servers for such uses.

“We're looking
at those as options for future deployments, but nothing specific to
announce at this time,” said a Facebook spokesman.

“The world's
first large-scale deployment of ARM servers in the data center
represents Baidu’s leadership in cloud computing system infrastructure,”
said Wang Jin, vice president of engineering at Baidu, speaking in a
press statement.

“In order to bring greater storage density to
the data center, lower total cost of ownership, and deliver efficiency
to a new level, Baidu integrated leading design capabilities with
Marvell’s advanced chipset solutions,” he added.

Marvell was
among the first chip makers to test out concepts for ARM-based servers.
It has developed prototype designs with Dell and Taiwan’s Mitac.

Seems like Baidu was more interested in the storage technology from Marvell and got a bundle with the processor included. But this is significant that they would deploy them in their datacenters and adopt ARM.